Keenan: Video Games: Smart, naughty or nice?

Family discussions about video games can stir up emotions at any time of the year, but they can be particularly heated around the holiday season, especially when discussing gifts for young guys.

“We could get him a bike or a new snowboarding helmet,” exasperated parents say, “but what he really wants is that gory new video game or online gaming credits.” Discussion then ensues about the risks of a sedentary lifestyle, wasted time, and encouraging violent behaviour, even if it’s only onscreen.

While video game policy is an individual family decision, science can give us some insights into online gaming and the brain. A recent U.K. study explored the relationship between video game playing and what experts call “fluid intelligence” — abstract thinking, problem-solving, and recognizing complex patterns.

Researchers at the University of York studied young male expert players of a popular multi-player Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game called League of Legends. It involves strategic, fast-paced collaboration between team members, usually in different locales.

This expert player group was found to “have an average IQ of around 115-120, putting them in the top 15% of the population.” They also note participants with higher IQs tended to score higher in the game. Their game performance and IQ scores tests also followed the same age distribution. It turns out that both IQ and strategy-oriented video game performance tend to peak in the mid-20s.

In another study, the same researchers analyzed published data on First Person Shooter (FPS) games like Destiny and Battlefield 3. These involve a player hunting down and avoiding other players, and are seen from a character’s point of view. The FPS data did not show the same links between IQ and performance. In fact, scoring in shooter games starts to decline in the late teens.

It’s important to note that these researchers are not saying that playing video games affects your intelligence, or that more intelligent people play certain games, or chose not to play. They are only showing us an interesting correlation.

However, they do speculate that in the future video games might be used for IQ testing. They would be cheaper, and more widely available than pen and paper tests, and there might be less test-taking anxiety.

There’s a darker side to all this. Information on your game playing behaviour could be tracked, analyzed and sold to advertisers, insurance companies, headhunters, or even your current employer. Looking for a hotshot salesperson with high intelligence and good teamwork skills? The answer might come from his or her gaming performance.

For parents and grandparents mulling over junior’s holiday gift list, there’s also the question of possible links to violent behaviour. The answer to that is still clear as mud.

An American Psychological Association (APA) task force reviewed academic papers on this subject published between 2005 and 2013. Their controversial 2015 report claimed there was “a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behaviour, empathy and sensitivity to aggression.”

However, 238 scholars quickly wrote a letter to the APA criticizing the report and asking the group to retire its “outdated and problematic statements on video game violence.”

On the flip side, a study from Brock University found significantly lower sociomoral reasoning levels in adolescents who played three or more hours of violent video games per day, compared to those who reported they played one hour per day.

The American Academy of Pediatrics criticized video games that use human or other living targets, or award points for killing “because this teaches children to associate pleasure and success with their ability to cause pain and suffering to others.”

Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University, an expert in the psychology of video games, wrote that “Adolescents who expose themselves to greater amounts of video game violence were more hostile, reported getting into arguments with teachers more frequently, were more likely to be involved in physical fights, and performed more poorly in school.” Again, we’re talking correlation, not necessarily causation.

While I can’t settle family disputes about video gaming, I can remind you that there is a video game rating system which you can find at esrb.org. Similar ratings saved me from fulfilling the request of our eight-year-old Australian grandson at a games store in that country. Well, actually it was the store clerk who informed me that it would be illegal to buy him the game he wanted. Of course, with online buying, young people can probably get their hands on just about anything, so parental and grandparental discretion is still going to be necessary.

Or you could just go for the bike or snowboarding helmet.

Dr. Tom Keenan is an award-winning journalist, public speaker, professor in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, and author of the bestselling book, Technocreep, (www.technocreep.com)

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